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A Google employee just broke the world record for calculating pi

March 14th, 2019

A Google employee has broken the world record for calculating pi just in time for the mind-bogglingly long number's special day.

Emma Haruka Iwao spent four months working on the project in which she calculated pi to 31.4 trillion digits.

Pi holds a special place in the realm of math. It's an irrational number that continues infinitely without repetition. You calculate it by dividing a circle's circumference by its diameter.

Iwao did her number crunching primarily from Google's office in Osaka, Japan, where she works at as a developer and advocate for Google Cloud. Fittingly, she used 25 Google Cloud virtual machines to generate the enormously long number. It's the first pi record calculated on the cloud.